Casting Doubts on the Viability of WiFi Offloading

Executive Summary

With the advent of the Smartphone, mobile data usage has exploded which in turn has created tremendous pressure on cellular data networks. A promising candidate to reduce the impact of cellular data growth is Wi-Fi off-loading. However, recent data from their study of two hundred student Smartphone users casts doubts on the reductions that can be gained from Wi-Fi off-loading. Despite the users operating in a dense university Wi-Fi environment, cellular consumption still dominated overall data usage. The authors believe the root cause of lesser Wi-Fi utilization can be traced to the Wi-Fi being optimized for laptop Wi-Fi reception rather than the more constrained Smartphone Wi-Fi reception.